{"id":12946,"date":"2014-07-11T18:31:22","date_gmt":"2014-07-12T00:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flovalleynews.com\/?p=12946"},"modified":"2014-07-11T18:31:22","modified_gmt":"2014-07-12T00:31:22","slug":"third-person-inside-a-writers-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flovalleynews.com\/?p=12946","title":{"rendered":"Third Person: Inside a Writer\u2019s Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sandra Olmsted<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writer director Paul Haggis presents a negotiation of grief, guilty, and reality in his latest film, Third Person<\/em>. Much like his earlier film, Crash<\/em> (2004), Haggis employs his own special brand of magical realism in Third Person<\/em>, which makes the film strange and confusing as three stories played out in New York, Rome, and Paris and the \u201ccharacters\u201d who populate them intertwine. They have either sprung from the mind of Michael (Liam Neeson), or he knows them. Three dark-haired women and two blonde women attorneys resemble each other for a reason, which is one of the puzzles Haggis develops. Discovering which characters are fabrications of Michael\u2019s mind provides the central puzzle of Haggis\u2019 film. In Third Person<\/em>, three stories of a life in disarray explore the loss of a child and the guilt related to it in various situations, but the stories unfold very slowly, making this an overly-long film only for the patient viewer who doesn\u2019t want everything explained quickly and easily in the first ten minutes.<\/p>\n

In one of the variations, Scott (Adrien Brody), an American in Rome for industrial espionage, scores his fashion design secrets and stops by a local bar, where he meets Monika (Moran Atias), a immigrant from Eastern Europe. She\u2019s on her way to pick her eight-year-old daughter up from the traffickers who smuggled the child to Italy. When the money she was to pay the smugglers goes missing, Scott plunges into the drama of Monika\u2019s world while listening repeatedly to the message left him by his seven-year-old daughter and being hung up on by his wife in New York. Once the smugglers sees Monika with a \u201crich American boyfriend,\u201d they keep upping the price and threatening to sell the girl into sex slavery. The scenario appeals to Scott\u2019s need to be the hero and save the child and will echoes emotions in Michael\u2019s story, when it is revealed.<\/p>\n

In a second variation on the theme, Julia (Mila Kunis) struggles to regain partial custody of her son after an incident where she may have endangered the child\u2019s life. Even though she ultimately saved her son\u2019s life, Rick (James Franco), her ex-husband and a now famous artist, won\u2019t let her see their son and enjoys using the legal proceedings to show that Julia is irresponsible. Julia either self-sabotages or has bad luck at every turn, and when she misses an important meeting, she forfeits any opportunity to see her child. Rick\u2019s live-in girlfriend, Sam (Loan Chabanol), becomes a witness to Julia\u2019s grief and guilt in a chance meeting, and although Julia doesn\u2019t know who Sam is, Sam sympathizes with Julia. Torn up by being unable to hold her child and struggling to hold menial jobs after giving up a promising acting career to raised their son, Julia take extreme actions, which again mirror emotions about fame won and lost and letting go in Michael\u2019s tale.<\/p>\n

Michael, whose first book won him a Pulitzer Prize, struggles to finish a new novel when his girlfriend, Anna (Olivia Wilde), joins him in his Paris, but stays in a separate hotel room. She also gets calls from another man. Michael and Anna have a frenetic love which requires that they torment each other. Some of the ways they torment each other amuse, arouse, and\/or others frighten both them and the audience. They seem to be punishing each other, yet they also have moments of real love and understanding. She wants validation for her fiction writing, which he labels only an extension of her journalistic writing, and that temporarily drives her into the arms of another older man. This man\u2019s identity reveals Anna to be a lost child of another kind. Meanwhile, Michael\u2019s publisher tells him he won\u2019t publish his latest work because the quality of his work has fallen. Michael and his wife, Elaine (Kim Basinger), an attorney, exchange a few phone calls, revealing more details of their son\u2019s death and the truths Michael cannot tell himself or others.<\/p>\n

In addition to the themes of a lost child, marriages falling apart, and secrets kept, the theme of technology failing occurs in each story as does a negotiation of the elusiveness of fame. Unable to deal with his grief and guilt over his son\u2019s death, Michael struggles to write away his feelings by creating third person accounts of people dealing with the same loss and emotions. The trick is figuring out which of the storylines and the backstories, characters, and subplots are real, where overlap between reality and the writer\u2019s imagination, and why some aren\u2019t real at all. Haggis resorts to magical realism and again uses a single moment to illuminate the puzzle he\u2019s created when a slip of paper seemingly transports itself across the Atlantic from one hotel room to another. Clearly, Haggis uses a blending of reality, fiction, and imagination to show how a creative mind struggles to make sense of tragedy.<\/p>\n

The performances make the film work, and every actor gives their all to their roles; however, Mila Kunis stands out. Her emotional, heart-wrenching performance evokes pity, sadness, and even disgust at times. Kudos to Haggis for eliciting great performances for his cast; of course, incredibly talented actors and actresses make up that cast. Third Person<\/em>, a Sony Pictures Classics release, opens July 11, and runs a long 137 minutes. The film is rated R for language and some sexuality\/nudity. More of Olmsted\u2019s reviews can be found at <www.thecinematicskinny.com>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sandra Olmsted Writer director Paul Haggis presents a negotiation of grief, guilty, and reality in his latest film, Third Person. Much like his earlier film, Crash (2004), Haggis employs his own special brand of magical realism in Third Person, which makes the film strange and confusing as three stories played out in New York, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","entry"],"yoast_head":"\nThird Person: Inside a Writer\u2019s Mind - flovalleynews.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/flovalleynews.com\/?p=12946\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Third Person: Inside a Writer\u2019s Mind - flovalleynews.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Sandra Olmsted Writer director Paul Haggis presents a negotiation of grief, guilty, and reality in his latest film, Third Person. 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